Felicity, honey, it’s a little hard to fight with you doing that in my ear.

Felicity + Oliver’s shoulder

Carry you

I didn’t know I had such a thing for watching a handsome man carry a gorgeous woman when trying not to suffocate and escape from crazies. 

Olicity |  Arrow

I love the back touches/back rubs when they work together. So intimate. 

Petition for this be Oliver’s excuse to get out of anything and everything.

source: oliverfelicitygifs

A Post-6x16 Olicity Fic

(Read on AO3)

William is long since asleep by the time Oliver makes it home. He tosses his damp peacoat onto the chair before unceremoniously flopping onto the bed. 

“You okay?” Felicity asks from her side of the bed, setting aside her tablet and scooting closer to him. 

“Yeah,” he sighs, eyes fixed on the ceiling.

“I know this must be hard for you, letting your baby sister go.” Felicity’s palm comes up to rest directly over his heart, her favorite place, fingers moving in lazy, well-traveled circles. 

“Not as hard as I thought it would be. She’s happy. That’s all I’ve ever wanted for her.”

“I know your parents would be proud. Of both of you.”

Oliver tilts his head to regard her. “I hope so,” he breathes quietly, letting himself wander back into simple, innocent childhood memories as he loses himself in Felicity’s gaze. 

Felicity watches him back with open sympathy and devotion, seeming to read his innermost sorrows and knowing exactly what he needs before he even dares ask for it. After a minute of comfortable silence, she slides down to lie next to him and nestles her head against his shoulder. 

Felicity’s voice is muted and gentle, and her warm breath tickles his neck, even as her words fill his gut with lead. “So about what Thea said…is that why you sometimes leave the light on in the bathroom?”

Oliver huffs and looks away, trying to mask the bleak uncertainty beneath indifference. But his old habits only last for a second, because even in the silence he feels Felicity’s persistence. Of course she would hear the pain beneath a joke. That’s a Felicity specialty. He should have seen this coming. She knows him too well for him to convincingly keep anything from her.

As Oliver wrestles with the wary voice that’s always there, telling him not to vocalize his insecurities, he brings his own free hand to meet hers, running his thumb in slow, easy strokes across the back of her hand. “It’s not that I was afraid of the dark. I…I was afraid of who I am in it.” His thumb goes still. “And then, on the island, I sort of became the monster I had created in my head.”

Oliver swallows, fighting to keep the onslaught of more recent, horrific memories at bay. Thankfully, these are not in dream form, so he feels slightly more in control. Sometimes he can still feel the biting, bitter rain and ice-cold ocean spray seeping through his skin down to the bone. He can still remember the worst night of his life, that first night on Lian Yu, swallowed up in pitch-black darkness, before Yao Fei had rescued him. There had been no moon that night to guide him, no stars peeking through the heavy clouds. He’d learned very early on to either fight the darkness and lose…or embrace the darkness and survive. Maybe he’d learned a little too well.

“Hey, you’re not a monster,” Felicity says against his ear. “You never were.”

“Maybe.”

Maybe Thea’s right. Maybe now, after all this time and hurt and help, after finally learning how to live again, perhaps for the first time ever, he can truly say that he wants to be the Green Arrow…and for the right reasons. Not merely to right his father’s wrongs. Not merely to become something else. But to become the best version of himself. He wonders if that can really be true. He wants to be the best version of himself as a father and husband, too. Does being the Green Arrow make him better equipped to love and cherish the remaining two most important people in his life? 

Selfishly, he worries that without Thea here, the part of him that only she can help keep in the light will fall back into the shadows. 

“You don’t have to be afraid, Oliver.”

Oliver’s lips twitch, and he marvels, not for the first time, if Felicity can in fact hear the conflict churning inside him. “I know. I’m not,” he tells her honestly. “Not with you.”

“Well, if it helps, I had a nightlight till I was about eight.”

“Really?”

“Yeah, an astronaut. Kept the aliens away. Lot of good it did me two years ago. I really needed it when my dad…when he…”

Oliver pulls her closer, tightening his arm around her back; this time, his touch is grounding her, keeping her safe from her own haunting ghosts. They give and take like this often, another secret language they share, one that grows more and more fluent every day of their marriage. 

Oliver frowns when something she said finally catches up with him. “You had an astronaut nightlight because you were afraid of space?”

She answers with a playful swat against his chest. “Yeah, well, you aren’t the only one who’s allowed to be enigmatic.”

He huffs. “Thank you.”

“For what?”

“For not making me feel alone.”

“You’re never alone,” she says, before muttering a little derisively, “I bet even the amazing League of Assassins temptress couldn’t do that.”

“Hardly a temptress.” He plays along for her sake, though he knows what she’s really hinting at. It’s taken Oliver years to learn to read beneath the layers of sarcasm, but at last he’s come to understand many of his wife’s insecurities intimately. “I’m sorry. I know it was weird having Nyssa there…”

“Taunting me about being your second wife? Yeah, that was super fun. But if you’re feeling especially penitent, a pampered breakfast would not be unwelcome.”

“Including waffles?”

“Of course. Waffles are a given.”

He chuckles, quickly kissing the top of her head. “I think that can be arranged.”

“By the way, you don’t think she expects us to, you know, keep the creepy annulment dagger, do you? Technically Nyssa cut you free or…cut herself free? So everything should still be unofficially official, even if, say, we gave it to Goodwill? I guess I should be thankful that didn’t require some kind of weird blood oath–

“Felicity–”

“Yeah?”

He waits patiently until she grows still and he’s recaptured her gaze. “You’re the only wife I’ve ever had or will have. And more importantly, you’re the only wife I want.”

She smiles, her eyes teasing him. “Well, good, because you’re stuck with me forever.”

“Promise?” he breathes.

“Promise. Now, kiss me, husband.”

And he does, pulling her close, pouring his heart out to her in his touch and in secret lavishings whispered in her ear. After a long time, Oliver twists out of his wife’s embrace just long enough to turn off the lamp, plunging their room into pitch-black darkness. But Felicity’s arms are still there, warm and soft and welcoming, and her love is so vibrant and consuming that it drowns out the darkness. 

don’t sass your wife, oliver.